1 October 2004 (16 Tishrey 5765)
Even though I am not so interested in environmental ecology as in human ecology, how environmental problems are dealt with here in Israel causes me grave concern. I am not sure whether such lack of awareness of these problems is only at the level of policy makers in the government and municipalities or also at the level of individual citizens.
Every time I dump my household garbage into trash boxes on the street, I feel guilty as I do not (have to) classify it by type, which is already deeply engraved in my conscience. I am not familiar with the situation in other developed countries, but as far as Japan is concerned, all municipalities mandate their citizens to classify garbage by type, at least into flammable and inflammable ones. It is true that it is convenient that I do not have to worry about this here and can throw everything together, but it disturbs my conscience as it is illegal in the country where I spent the majority of my life until quite recently. Furthermore, the awareness and implementation of recycling garbage still seems minimal here, at least compared to Japan.
All this may not only because of the limited budget and facilities in the government and municipalities but also because of that aspect of traditional Jewish culture that does not put much emphasis on the physical world. I remember hearing a good Ultra-Orthodox friend of mine tell me rather self-derogatorily that they have less sense of esthetics and that this explains why Ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods are less clean than their secular counterparts. (Incidentally, I have to point out to their credit that they have one advantage over secular neighborhoods: no one keeps dogs in their house, so people like me who are very sensitive to noise do not have to be bothered by the noise of our friends on the four.) It seems to me that even secular Israelis, including some policy makers, are not free from this aspect of traditional Jewish culture.
8 October 2004 (23 Tishrey 5765)
I am really satisfied with my new apartment in Jerusalem (except for the noise of a barking dog in the neighborhood which has turned out to be owned by an extremely famous public figure): a nice landlord, friendly neighbors-cum-friends who actually found this apartment for me, beautiful and convenient neighborhood and the apartment itself. I was also satisfied with my apartment in Kobe where I lived before coming here, but there is at least one big difference between the two. My new apartment is much bigger, not because I pay more but because apartments one can rent at the same price (relative to the standard of income) are simply much bigger and better built in Israel. Japanese houses and apartments are often mocked at as "rabbit hutches"; unfortunately, this is mostly true, at least in big cities, unless you are very rich and can afford to rent a bigger one.
Of course, I am not so naive as to say that everything in Israel is good and everything in Japan is bad. Even as for housing, in which Israel is better, there is one thing, or to be more precise, custom in Japan that seems to me not only more esthetic and but also more healthier. It is the custom of taking off shoes in entering a private house. I am not sure whether it is restricted to Japan or is observed in its neighbors like Korea and China, but it must be at least partly a result of the culture of dividing inside and outside (uchi and soto in Japanese). Although Japan has imported many customs and ideas from the West after the Meiji Restoration, it can also export some to the West, including Israel. The custom of taking off shoes in private houses can be a good candidate for export.
It is more esthetic because you can keep your house much cleaner even in bad weather. Every time I see myself or someone else cleaning the floor, I cannot help feeling some absurdity because not taking off shoes inside the house and being forced to clean the floor more frequently and more systematically seems like a Sisyphean labor. This Japanese custom is also much healthier. A number of modern diseases may be the result of maltreatment of feet, and wearing shoes, often bad ones at that, all day long must be nothing but maltreatment or even torture of your own feet orthopedically. All in all, this custom makes more sense to me than the custom of not taking off shoes. Unfortunately, houses and apartments in Israel (and other countries) are not built to maintain this custom.
15 October 2004 (30 Tishrey 5765)
A surprisingly large number of people who are otherwise knowledgeable in computing seem to have little or no doubt in considering a word processor as the sole means of preparing electronic documents. It is true that it is one of the main reasons why many people start using computers and it has helped popularize them. But being an amalgam trying to embody two separate functions of preparing the textual content of a document and its physical layout at the same time, it has blurred for many people this important distinction. It has also helped neglect electronic Swiss army knives called text editors and plain text. When you want/have to concentrate on the content with no need to pay attention to its layout, it is stupid and inefficient to use a word processor. It seems to me that the idea of WYSIWYG is an illusion.
The number of text editors that once existed and do exist now may far exceed that of any other software, and more and more of them claim to support Unicode. For the past two weeks I have been looking for a decent Unicode-compliant editor for Windows that also supports the Unicode bidirectional algorithm to edit Hebrew text, partly for a course on Hebrew computational linguistics I will start teaching next week at Bar-Ilan University. The features that are necessary for text editors to be usable for Hebrew probably include the following in the descending order of importance: 1) save documents in UTF-8 without a byte order mark (very important); 2) proper display of Hebrew (RTL) text (very important); 3) proper input of Hebrew (RTL) text (very important); 4) proper editing of existing Hebrew (RTL) text (very important); 5) right alignment of a whole Hebrew (RTL) document (important); 6) word wrap (important); 7) find and replace with regular expressions; 8) find and replace in multiple documents; 9) spell checking in Hebrew.
To my great surprise and disappointment, the majority of those self-proclaimed "Unicode-compliant" editors I have tried - I have probably tried more than 20 - have turned out to support Unicode only partially at best. As of this writing, only two support the first four features, but their functionality as an editor is rather limited: BabelPad (freeware) and UnicEdit. On the other hand, two that are buggy in the fourth feature, hence severely limit writers of Hebrew have far better editing functionality: Oxygen XML Editor (crossplatform shareware) and EmEditor (shareware; freeware for academic and technical use). One editor all the first six features except the first, the most important: Orient. [updated comparison chart]
It took me years since the days of Windows 3.1 until I finally found a more or less satisfactory word processor in the form of OpenOffice.org Writer some time ago after trying many others, including Word, which I cannot stand any longer for various technical reasons. It is paradoxical and frustrating that I have not found an editor, which is more fundamental, that satisfies more or less the same requirements in terms of Hebrew support. Considering the present trend in software development, I may as well hold more expectations for open source initiatives than for commercial companies.
22 October 2004 (7 Kheshvan 5765)
This week I started teaching at Bar-Ilan University. I would like to express my special thanks to Prof. Ora Schwarzwald (my mentor), Prof. Michael Sokoloff (head of Department of Hebrew and Semitic Languages) and Prof. Joshua Schwartz (dean of Faculty of Jewish Studies), who gave me this precious opportunity. For the first time in my life I could teach subjects I really specialize in, including Hebrew morphology, Hebrew computational linguistics and Jewish contact linguistics. Although I am more or less confident about my familiarity with the materials I am supposed to teach, I had some worries about lack of confidence in me on the part of my students. Fortunately, this turned out to be an unfounded fear; they accepted me quite nicely though I found one or two suspicious glances.
From the very beginning I enjoyed the interaction with my students - something that was almost totally missing in Japan except for some very exceptional cases. Lack of verbal and nonverbal reactions on the part of my students, be it due to indifference or not, was the main reason for my stress while I was teaching in Japan. The stagnant atmosphere that ruled most of the courses there had a negative effect even on my health. Having taught this week, I was really glad to find that I would not have to suffer from this any more. I am sure and know that there are enough good students in Japan, but the society in general and the educational system in particular "tame" them so that they stop using in class a faculty that distinguishes us homo loquens from other animals, that is, speech.
I also found something I had never noticed before about average Israeli students. They are liable to become frightened much more easily than their Japanese counterparts if the course requirements are even a little more than their present level of knowledge. If I were required to do something that might be slightly more than my ability, I would take it as a stimulus for self-improvement instead of being frightened. I have an impression that many students in Japan will do the same, at least those enrolled in competitive universities. This may be the result of the difference in the degree of emphasis put on discipline. It seems to me that on the one hand, students in Israel are not brainwashed as in Japan, but on the other, they are generally less self-disciplined, hence less ready for stringent requirements. But this is, of course, a negligible issue compared to lack of reactions.
29 October 2004 (14 Kheshvan 5765)
For most users of email the so-called spam mail must be the most annoying problem. It does bother me, but now that I have managed to decrease the number of spam messages I receive every day to almost zero by taking some measures, the only remaining battle I have to fight is against non-spam messages that violate netiquette, especially that of quoting. I already know that I am fighting a losing battle. It is often more difficult to fight against ignorance than against malice.
When I started using email in April 1996, I still belonged to a minority; many of the people around me did not use email. Since cyber-mavens still constituted the majority, I could learn unwritten codes of netiquette by observing and imitating them. But as email has become more and more popular, and having an email address (or multiple addresses) is already the rule rather than the exception, there are less and less opportunities to learn netiquette, and as a result ignorance prevails over time-honored tradition.
The so-called bottom posting used to be the norm of quoting messages in your replies in good old days and is still followed by old timers. But the annoying quoting style of the so-called top posting has become so rampant, mainly due to the widespread use of Microsoft Outlook Express, which uses this style by default, by newbies, vis-à-vis far better but much less known alternatives like Mozilla Thunderbird. Nothing bothers me more in my daily life than barking dogs, women with heavy perfume and email replies that quote my original messages in their entirety in this manner. About nine out of every ten replies I receive, whether from friends, acquaintances or strangers, contribute to the rise of my blood pressure this way. The request to refrain from this bothering custom with a brief explanation for a better alternative must be the sentence I have typed most often in email, but I have already become too tired of repeating it.
In a sense spam messages are even more tolerable than these ones because in the former the whole part is junk, but in the latter you have to deal with superfluous noise mixed with non-junk. It is easier to discard a whole bag of rotten tomatoes than to distinguish edible tomatoes from rotten ones in a single bag.